All posts tagged spoilage

M.I.T. researchers who more typically work on new ways to detect chemical weapons and explosives have created an affordable hand-held sensor that can tell when fruit is ripening.

Techniques already exist to detect ethylene, a hormone that initiates ripening, in the air around fruit, but they are expensive and unwieldy. The new sensor, which need not even touch the fruit, includes tens of thousands of carbon nanotubes, with a copper compound added, and might cost as little as a dollar (including a chip that would transmit information wirelessly). Grocers wielding the device could identify which pallet of bananas or avocados to sell first; and people storing fruit could make economically sound decisions about when to subject it to expensive interventions to preserve it, including refrigeration.

Roughly 10% of produce is lost to spoilage each year, so the innovation could save millions of dollars.

The research, by Birgit Esser, Jan M. Schnorr and Timothy M. Swager — affiliated both with M.I.T.’s chemistry department and its Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies — is described in a forthcoming article in Angewandte Chemie.

Biographies

Gary Rosen is the editor of Review and the former managing editor of Commentary magazine. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of "American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding" and the editor of "The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq."